Investigating Musical Taxonomy in the era of Streaming Platforms: Insights from Rap music through actual consumption data

• Questions top-down musical categorisations by adopting a ground-up approach from actual consumption data. • Identifies key thematic boundaries in audiences consumption, in the case of rap music in France on the Deezer streaming platform. • Links the emergence of those in-consumption boundaries with audience socio-demography, highlighting the importance of gender and age. This paper examines the musical boundaries that emerge from the distinct consumption patterns of rap audiences. Using the actual listening histories of around 1000 French users of the music streaming platform Deezer, we apply dimensionality reduction and clustering methods to explore the musical boundaries that emerge from distinctive audience consumption patterns, with a particular focus on rap music. We show that these boundaries exhibit salient thematic distinctions, and each region of the map holds its own combination of themes. Focusing on six demographic groups based on age and gender, we find that each exhibits a unique pattern of music preference across the highlighted boundaries. Our findings deepen and renew our understanding of the dynamics in which music boundaries are formed, and highlight the importance of studying and comprehending these dynamics, showcasing one way to shed light on that matter.